Assessing the Damage from the Hagel Fight

All signs now point to Hagel’s confirmation next week, so the failure of the opposition campaign is almost complete. It’s worth looking back over the last two months to see how much damage this unnecessary, unprecedented resistance to a Cabinet nominee has caused. There’s no denying that Hagel comes out of the process bruised. The daily smears of his critics have driven up Hagel’s unfavorable numbers, and the entire process will genuinely make it more difficult for him to do his job once he is confirmed. The effort to block him will have some real consequences for the U.S. in the years to come, and these could have been avoided entirely if Senate Republicans had refused to indulge their party’s hard-line ideologues.

Hagel’s opponents in the Senate have made the atmosphere in the Armed Services Committee more poisonous than it needs to be. It remains to be seen what effect that will have on the functioning of the committee in its oversight role. Most Senate Republicans have inflicted far more significant political damage on themselves. Republicans aren’t going to lose any Senate seats over this, but they have come across as petty and unreasonable, neither of which makes it any easier to improve their party’s reputation with former and new voters. They have just spent the last few months validating almost every dissident conservative and realist argument that they can’t be trusted on foreign policy and national security with the views they currently hold, which undermines the chances of credible Republican foreign policy reform in the near future. Regrettably, few things have recently demonstrated how much the GOP needs that reform than the spectacle we’ve been watching for the last two months.

To the extent they have been involved in the opposition effort, Republican and movement conservative leaders and activists have come out of this looking absurd and irrelevant. The anti-Hagel pundits and activists were sure that they could derail Hagel, but all that they managed to do was remind everyone that they are hard-line fanatics that can and should be ignored, and despite this most Senate Republicans still chose to identify with their cause. As Scott McConnell notes, the anti-Hagel effort both confirms and reflects the fact that the national GOP has unfortunately become a joke. As long as its national leaders continue to heed the bad advice of foreign policy hard-liners, it will continue to be one for a long time.

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22 Responses to Assessing the Damage from the Hagel Fight

It is amazing to watch the epistemically-closed right. All the time Republican politicians and scribes and activists think they are packing four aces when they’ve got nothing. The American Conservative staff touts their publication as “reality-based,” and it manifestly is that, even as virtually all the other conservative periodicals and blogs are rooted in anything but reality.

A Quinnipiac University poll released yesterday showed that just 36 percent of New Jersey voters approve of Menendez’s job performance, a 15-point drop from January. Seventy percent of those polled, including 72 percent of independents, said they had read or heard about the controversy surrounding the 59-year- old lawmaker’s ties to Florida eye doctor Salomon Melgen. “

I would throw out a “I would love to have him and all of the other ex-republicans over on the Democratic side” but I wouldn’t want that. It’s not so much that Democrats might be to Left to accept them and more of the fear that Democrats might bend to the Right and bring them in, effectively pushing out the Republicans and making it hard for a new party to emerge that’s different from them. I’d rather have two parties that have competing ideas than one ‘perfect’ party no matter how that ‘perfect’ would end up appearing.

The best would be if everyone would stay in the Republican side and hunt out sympathetic Democrats to form a voting block of your own (no silly names like “Friends of the Center” though, just both sides willing to break party) until the public gives up on the hardliners and votes in enough new blood to evoke a major shift.

The problem will be finding a way to get around being “primaried” which seems to be the hardliner’s best weapon for stopping such a change.

As far as the article, Not too much to add really except, yes, Republicans have utterly ruined themselves on foreign policy. The one saving grace is that the public isn’t that focused on it so it’s not a deal breaker.

On the other hand, I think the up coming fights, including Sequestration, will be the “Domestic Hagel” test. If they botch this one, they are effectively doomed as a national party.

(or if they really try to win the presidency by warping the electorial college. Do they really want to know what will happen if they win a presidency without the popular vote in 2016?)

Menendez of course won’t be facing the voters of NJ until 2018 so unless he is forced to resign his seat early it won’t be an issue. Should Menendez resign, this means that Chris Christie would appoint Menendez’s sucessor which probably is enough to information one needs to answer the ‘will he resign’.

More generally NJ is a sufficiently blue state such that a generic Dem – which is basically what Menendez is – can easily win. And again even should he decide not to run in 2018 it isn’t as if there is a deep bench of talent on the Republican side to run for Senate (the NJ Republican Congressional delegation is decidedly to the right of the state as a whole). NJ hasn’t had a Republican Senator since I believe Nicholas Brady who left in 1982, and can’t really see that changing any time soon.

evolveddeepsoutherner – The EC, even with winner-take-all, is said to be a more equitable system than straight popular vote precisely because it gives smaller states some leverage. Otherwise, the nominees would focus entirely on winning the larger population centers and ignore the rest of the country.

That’s the theory anyway; I doubt anyone reckoned on the country becoming so polarized that the only states which “matter” are a handful of swing states.

However, if the choice were to be between letting the GOP gerrymander the Electoral College the way they’ve gerrymandered the House of Representatives, or going to a direct popular vote system, I’d prefer the latter.

Obama occupies the center, the center left and the center right. All that remains of the electorate for the Republicans are the dittoheads and the snake handlers. Senate Republicans are merely serving their owners while pandering to their base.

The opposition to Hagel is no big deal. It’s just another manifestation of political corruption. No new combination of D’s and R’s is likely to reduce corruption. Electoral politics itself therefore is irrelevant.

I really don’t know what the evil Senators mcpain, graham cracker, and cruise have to complain about. News that Obama is building another assassination base in Africa ought to make it clear that he is one of them. Americans don’t give a hoot about any of this nonsense so they pretty much have a free hand to kill anyone they don’t like.

“However, leaked emails from the FBI suggest that the United States government is taking Menendez’s rumored actions seriously, investigating all of the major claims. If it’s true that Menendez hired under age prostitutes, as he’s accused of doing, he would undoubtedly be forced to resign.”

Is the issue that Republicans made fools of themselves by defending positions on war and military intervention most Americans reject? Or is it that the Senate Republicans got away with this ridiculous hearing and nomination process? I honestly don’t know.

The real test will come in how Hagel draws support for reducing the defense budget and taking a prudent approach to what American power can and should do. The neos will fight him every step of the way. Realists and non-interventionists have to figure out ways to dominate the public stage like the neos have for 12 years, not counting their out-of-town showing during the Clinton years.

These Republicans are being nothing if not true to the wishes of those who pull their strings. It isn’t really important in between elections what the voters think, especially so far away from the next one for these senators.

@Fran Macadam: “These Republicans are being nothing if not true to the wishes of those who pull their strings.”

And as you say, voters aren’t the ones primarily pulling those strings. Voters didn’t demand that Hagel be raked over the coals about Israel. They couldn’t have cared less. The Hagel roast was strictly for the benefit of deep pockets contributors, a make-good for GOP paymasters like Sheldon Adelson.

The Hagel confirmation fight has made the Republican Party’s relationship with Israel and Israeli interests look like Hezbollah’s relationship with Iran and Iranian interests. Had the neo-cons other main stream Republicans succeeded in blocking Hagel the United States would have come off looking like a vassal state of Israel.

back at the ranch – – And let us keep in mind that Sheldon Adelson wants Israel to prevent any independent Palestine from being recgonised. Meaning, endless occupation, grotesque expence for American taxpayers, etc etc.